New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people were at the centre of a national outcry over the abuse of children yesterday after a three-year-old girl was rushed to hospital with severe injuries, allegedly inflicted by members of her family.

Nia Glassie was hung from a clothes line and spun in a clothes dryer, police said. She remained in a coma in a children’s hospital in Auckland, with severe head and abdominal injuries, which police say were caused by months of abuse by relatives, including her stepfather and an uncle.

Helen Clark, the Prime Minister, urged members of the Maori community to report child abuse at the earliest opportunity to prevent further tragedies. She said: “I cannot believe that a child subjected to that level of horror, sadism, torture . . . that nobody knew. I can’t believe that.

Hmm.

The latest case of child abuse comes a year after the deaths of Cru and Chris Kahui, three-month-old Maori twins, brought the issue of Maori child abuse to national attention.

Cindy Kiro, the governmentappointed Children’s Commissioner, said that child abuse cases in New Zealand were “shockingly high and completely unacceptable”. Dr Kiro said: “We have known for some time that this has been the case and there is a desire to do something about it. It requires decent investment in programmes.”

Pita Sharples, an MP and the leader of the New Zealand Maori Party, said: “How do I feel when I hear they’re Maori? I feel ashamed. I feel guilty.”

Obviously not a politician taking many tips from CAIR. Otherwise he’d be demanding that people stopped making the connection between Maoris and child abuse because it’s blatant Maoriphobia, then he’d take a couple of kids into a grocery store, pretend to abuse them, then sue anyone who reported him to the authorities. Then he’d want a law making it illegal to report child abuse to the authorities because it’s blatant Maoriphobia.

17 Responses to “Pro John Doe”

One for netflicks: “Once were warriors”. Very good NZ movie. It’s centred on violent Maori culture in modern day NZ. However there is a big twist at the end which posits an intriguing idea. It turns out that the title does not refer to these violent people.

It suggests that the (true) Maori people have successfully integrated into NZ society. They are more or less invisible: businessmen, professionals, ordinary people. These are the descendents of the proud Maori warriors.

Those forming the violent sub-culture we see today are not the descendents of the Maori, but descendents of those the Maori brought to New Zealand from neighbouring Pacific islands – ie, their slaves.

I don’t know whether or not it is true, but it would have kicked up an awful stink in NZ if it isn’t.

Hadn’t realised the Maori had had slaves, but then again it was a pretty well universal institution in non-Christian societies, so it would be no surprise.
The thing that intrigues me is something I seem to remember reading about how, at the moment it was discovered (by a Yorkshireman, natch), NZ was on the brink of a humanitarian/ecological disaster and that, far from being noble savages living in idyllic harmony with nature etc etc, and that the place had been pretty well trashed. Don’t know how true this is. Any thoughts?

It’s amazing that we all don’t talk like Yorkshiremen down here. New Zealand is probably the only place on Earth, other than Yorkshire, where Geoffrey Boycott was popular.

Hmm. That period was slap bang in the middle of the little ice age. I wonder if lower plant productivity caused a bit of a crisis in NZ? They didn’t have the agricultural methods developed in Europe to improve farming efficiency and counter the effects of a colder climate.

Are you familiar with the idea that the Garden of Eden story is based on a long memory of the change from hunter gatherer (an easy lifestyle for the few it could support) to an agricultural society (longer hours of harder work, but supporting more people)? The same sentiment is reflected in Cane and Abel.

Just been reading the excellent Gideon Haigh on Dick Wardill – a very Yorkshire name, it would be quite entertaining were the man who scored the first-ever century in Australia to turn out to have been a Tyke.
(Wonder whether our would-have-been-colonial- cousins-had-GeorgeIII-handled-things-differently understand that all this cricket talk just happens naturally in the Yorkie-Aussie conversation?)

Did the Little Ice Age occur in the Antipodes? What’s the dendroclimatology on the subject? Not sure quite what agricultural techniques we had in our hemisphere to counter climate change in those days either. We’d take marginal land in and out of production as needed, and that was it. Enclosure of the open fields helped productivity a bit, but that was largely confined to East Anglia before the 18thC. I suppose that after we got the potato we’d got a full range of cereals and vegetables to use in different conditions – wonder what they had in NZ?

I can imagine that you’d regard any sort of life as superior to the agricultural life, even that of a hunter-gatherer. Speaking as a first-generation post-agricultural reader-scribbler, I certainly do. Isn’t free movement of labour wonderful?

It couldn’t have been that bad, since it wasn’t that long between your Yorkshireman discovering it and a lot of pious Scots turning it into their Zion. Paradise, and all that. But then they were coming from Scotland… Perhaps it’s a question of standards?

I think the hunter-gatherer gig did and still does sound so utopian because there aren’t any property rights. For one thing it doesn’t support that many people, as you point out, so there isn’t that much competition for that lovely little spot under the tree you’ve taken to sleeping on, but for another since subsistence doesn’t rely on the land but the things on the land (which can’t be easily owned) the land ends up belonging to the moon goddess or the great spirit or however those more primitive societies (American Indians, for example) phrased it that makes so many westerners go all misty eyes.

And I can see how a mini ice age in New Zealand would be much more serious than it would in England, since as we’ve all heard since Global Warming got fired (hah!) up there used to be vineyards in Northumberland or whatever, but the vines could have been taken from Italy, because there’s that much ecological diversity coming from a large swath of land ranging from the mediterranean to Scandinavia and from the Atlantic to the Arals and all sort of microclimates in between, whereas New Zealand, tho very long, doesn’t have quite the range to take from. So if they’re living on fern roots, and the ferns get chilly and die, they can’t very well migrate north to where the ferns still live because they’d be in the middle of the ocean.

Which, btw, is the concept behind those vegetation corridors that Tim Blair was making fun of. Whether or not global warming is real it’s a good idea to give species a place to migrate when their current digs become unsuitable.

Yes, the little ice age (and the earlier medieval warming period) were indeed world wide, with the exception of the Antartic, which tends to be opposite phase to the rest of the planet. It’s climatically isolated by the great southern ocean, and cloudiness (which cools the other parts of the planet) in the case of the Antartic (which is very white) creates warmer conditions. (Of course it’s still bloody cold).

This is from the recent book The Chilling Stars – one of the upstarts causing Global Warming to take early retirement.

Pity they were eaten to extinction by the Maori, as were the other extinct New Zealand birds – rails, adzebill, wrens, eagle – mentioned on that site. Reckon some indigenous peoples were more in touch with nature than others, at a guess.

American Indians used to drive whole herds of buffalo (good luck doing that now) off cliffs so they could eat just a few. And unlike your social studies teacher in grade school waxing on about how they used to use every bit of the animal, meat for eating, hide for living under and wearing, etc etc, they really did waste a lot. I think they had more pressing concerns, like survival and warfare, than sitting around devising ways to use that last little bit of hoof left over.

Here’s a good example of this (and one of the better-named sites in North America). Bone deposits are 10 meters deep. That slope there didn’t used to be there.

You think they’ve been experimenting with genetically modified water buffalo in S.A. and they escaped the lab? Perhaps one of them picked the lock with the tip of his horn, while another held it steady in his teeth, with a third giving instructions – a little to the left, no too much, better,…?